A blog about litigation in the EU Courts and beyond.

New Practice Directions at the Court of Justice

The Court of Justice has published new Practice Directions to parties. They are available here.

They take account of the all new Rules of Procedure of September 2012, as amended in June 2013 to add the Croatian language as a language of procedure.

The new Practice Directions are basically some common sense guidelines about how counsel should draft, structure and lodge procedural documents before the Court and conduct cases before it. They state that the application and defence should not exceed 30 pages and should be written intelligibly. Hmmm. If only more lawyers would heed that piece of advice !

All counsel should read them before representing clients before the Court of Justice! If it is possible to sum the up it would be like this: be clear, be concise, use common sense.